Quotes from Ouida

HE CHOSE DEATH RATHER THAN UNFAITHFULNESS. HE KNEW NO BETTER. HE WAS A DOG.

Beltran does not heed that I am near. But I can watch him, follow him, guard him in his sleep—it is enough. I ask no more. I am only a dog—I dare to love, I dare not even seek to be loved in answer.

For the most part people are cruel, cruel if only from lack of thought.

Now came the question, what should I do? "Nothing," the correct thing, according to the governor. "Stand for the county," my mother suggested. "Go as attaché to my cousin, the envoy to St. Petersburg," my relatives opined, who had triumphed, with much unholy glory, over my rustication, as is the custom of relatives from time immemorial.

The two men who were fencing were De Vigne and a smaller, slighter fellow; the one calm, cool, steady, and never at a disadvantage, the other, skilful indeed, but too hot, eager, and rapid: for in fencing, whether with the foils or the tongue, the grand secret is to be cool, since, in proportion to your tranquillity, grows your opponent's exasperation!

Well, besides—I was wondering whether Caesar was true to his Order when he said it was not enough for his wife to be pure, since she was not also above public suspicion; or whether he was but a cowardly cur, who cloaked social timidity in a grand period, and shrank before the mud pellets of social opinion. Which was it—eh?

It did not induce brain fever, or harm her so, belles lectrices. If we went down under every stroke in that way as novelists assume, we should all be loved of Heaven if that love be shown by early graves, as the old Greeks say.

Now and then you poor humanities, who are always so dimly conscious that you are all lies to one another, get a glimpse of various truths from some cynical dead man's diary, or some statesman's secret papers. But you never are warned: you placidly continue greedily to gobble up, unexamined, the falsehoods of public men; and impudently to adjudicate on the nurevealed secrets of private lives.

Will you take me home with you ?" I ventured to ask, emboldened by his honest kind eyes. "I have no home," ho said mournfully, "otherwise I would. I sleep under bridge-arches, or doorways, or anywhere I can; where I am not hunted away" "But that must be very miserable?" "Yes, it is miserable. But there are tens of thousands of human creatures that do*the same. I must not complain.

When we read Othello, we only behold the tempest of the passions and the wreck of a great soul; but when we see Othello, we are affronted by the color of the Moor's skin, and we are brought face to face with the vulgarities of the bolster!

A victory looks but a sorry thing to the boy conscript lying cramped, and bleeding, and crushed, and woe-begone in the ambulance wagon on the red evening-tide after the battle.

Believe me, it is the light or the darkness of our own fate that either gives "greenness to the grass and glory to the flower," or leaves both sickly, wan, and colorless.

It seemed to me happiness exquisite enough only to stretch my limbs in peace on the cool moss; only to pass the whole blithe day without one voice raised in anger at me; only just to be fed, and to be clean, and to be left quite free. The passion for freedom is intense in dogs.

make the House of Commons a cage for 500 parrots and apes, and complain of the decadence of oratory and of statecraft 1 And, indeed," he added with a grim chuckle, "the parrots and apes would more nearly resemble the politicians they would displace, than do the players of our day resemble the art which they affect to represent.

pale, but resolute as Eponina's or Gertrude von der Wart's — and I think the martyrdom of endurance is worse than the martyrdom of action!

I think if you knew what you did, even the most thoughtless amongst you would not sanction with your praise, and encourage with your coin, the brutality that trains dancing-dogs.

Who upholds that the good is oft interred with our bones. 'Tisn't true though it is Shakspeare who says it; if you leave your family or your pet hospital a good many thousands, you will get the cardinal virtues, and a trifle more, in letters of gold on your tomb; though if you have lived up to your income, or forgotten to insure, any penny-alining La Monnoye will do to scribble your epitaph, and break off with "C'est trop mentir pour cinq écus!

I love conservatism when it means the preservation of beautiful things, I love revolution when it means the destruction of vile ones.

Bravo!" said Curly, as five minutes afterwards we passed out from the great hall door. "You are a brick, De Vigne, and no mistake. How splendidly you pitched into that rascally keeper!" De Vigne laughed. "It was a good bit of fun. Always stand up for your rights, my boy; if you don't, who will? I never was done yet in my life, and never intend to be.

he could command an audience, set his box upright on its pole, opened its case, and began to play, bidding me dance to the music. The puppets never tired, of course; and I suppose he thought I was like them.

Why do people only tolerate Sheridan, and go into ecstasies over burlesques ?" said Beltran. "Because we want to laugh and not to think," said Denzil. "Now, to laugh at Sheridan you must first think with him.

Where grave philosophers have watched the setting sun die out of the sky, as the glories of their own youth have died away unvalued, till lost for ever. Where ascetic reading-men have mooned along its banks blind to all the loveliness of the water-lily below, or the clouds above, as they took their constitutional and pondered their prize essay.

I never judge people; seemingly bad actions may have good motives, good ones may spring from base and selfish ends.

When those poor devils of novelists jumble a lot of impossible coincidences all pell-mell together without building plan, or sequence, or any sort of sense, they are all wrong as to Art, clearly, but they are awfully true to Life.